bloodaxe

I was drafting this review when the news came that Matthew Sweeney had died on August 5th. I’d like to think of him, poet with a dried sunflower in one buttonhole and a dwarf red tulip in the other (as…

I don’t like jazz. Therefore, I had immediate misgivings when confronted with the pastel-painted jazz scene adorning the cover of Hannah Lowe’s latest collection Chan. Not wanting to judge a book by its cover, I forged ahead, only to find…

It says something, perhaps, about the power and mystery of Rosemary Tonks’ life (once the toast of literary 1960s Soho, turned religious recluse who repudiated all of her work) that I should have heard of her long before I read…

Omnesia is remarkable for being not one book but two – a ‘remix’ and an ‘alternative text’ – and W.N. Herbert prefaces both with an apology to the reader for requiring them to deal with two mirror texts. The content…

Stephanie Norgate's collection, The Blue Den, is a thoughtful study of the people and things which inhabit the edges of the conventional society. The poems are so well constructed that the reader becomes enmeshed in narratives that demand continual attention,…

Drawn from her past observations while working as a psychiatric nurse in London, Sally Read’s third collection, The Day Hospital, contains dramatised accounts of twelve patients over one day in a psychiatric hospital in London. Despite their longings and compulsions…

In his essay concluding Jade Ladder, Brian Holton discusses the trials, tribulations, negotiations and compromises involved in translating Chinese poetry into English. Some of Yang Lian and Qin Xiaoyu’s first choices were shelved, he writes, “because the joke just wasn’t…

The title poem, 'House of Tongues', is after Paul Bowles’ 1947 short story A Distant Episode which recounts the capture and physical mutilation of a linguistics professor travelling through an unnamed country that is probably Morocco. The professor suffers an…

In one of many gems in this extraordinary first collection, Ailbhe Darcy compares her emotional (and, implicitly, artistic) self to “a solitary magpie”: reflecting every colour and none, playing I-Spy with the gleams of a mind ‘Caw Poem’ contains everything…

I am going to start this article with a statistic. No poem under 10 lines has won the National Poetry Competition since (online) records began in 1978! The website shows winning poems only prior to 2000, but between 2001-2010 you…

The submissions window for ‘Dwelling’ is open from 1st June – 31st July 2020. We welcome poems that have not been previously published, either in print or online. Up to 4 poems may be sent via Submittable, or by post…

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